Exam Season: Can CogSci Help? (Part 1)

Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #110

May 05, 2025

For many, exam season is upon us (here in Scotland it’s been going for a while!).

Any of you who have enthusiastically embraced desirable difficulties and metacognition have already helped to prepare your students for exam success.

Today, I want to go beyond the specifics of how to take in new facts or concepts. How can cognitive science support effective independent study in everyday contexts?

The reality of studying

The reality of studying is messy. When students study independently, they do so without the structure of the classroom, and face lots of challenges not directly related to memory and learning. For example:

Procrastination
Distractions
Competing deadlines
Sleep
Stress

For cognitive science to attempt a complete picture of self-regulated exam study, we can’t think too narrowly about cognition: our approach needs to consider the real context and how it progresses over time.

Some insights

How can cognitive science help with the above issues? To answer this, we must still refer to basic research on learning, but also go beyond it. For example:

Sleep, stress and memory all interact. Students need to get plenty of sleep, and often fail to do so, especially when they are under pressure.
Students often make flawed choices about what and when to study, especially when time is short as they work towards assessments.

On the latter point, one particularly fascinating and useful line of research has investigated how students choose what to study next.

It might seem obvious (in line with desirable difficulties) that we want students to choose harder material. But imagine this scenario:

Maria is working on a series of History tasks. She spends several hours pondering over the work, and makes very little progress. Then she breaks off, feeling discouraged.

The example above is easy to imagine, and shows how time, choices, learning and emotion link together in real contexts.

A student like Maria who focuses on overly difficult work could end up making very little progress for the time devoted to it. This makes it a bad investment of time, especially at a crunch point in the academic year; researchers have called this the ‘labour in vain’ effect (Nelson & Leonesio, 1988).

We also know that students often repetitively re-read notes and fail to space their practice effectively.

This leads to a potentially toxic combination: too much time on difficult work, using shallow, ineffective study techniques.

A solution?

Is there a solution to the issues above? A useful approach is provided by Nate Kornell and Janet Metcalfe.

Kornell and Metcalfe’s work focuses on certain basic but crucial decisions that students make when studying:

What to prioritise;
When to keep studying;
When to switch task.

Unlike some previous work, their research also took account of limited time. They wanted to know about students’ judgements and study choices in situations where mastering everything is impossible due to time constraints.

A graphic with clocks, gears and a human head — Image via Pixabay

Judgements

Students are often poor at recognising how well they know something, how impactful a learning session is, or predicting their own future performance and memory.

However, Kornell and Metcalfe’s work sidesteps this issue by focusing just on student judgements of whether they were making progress or not.

When this is all students need to do, they tend to avoid items they already know or items that are too difficult. Instead, they focus on items that they’re close to mastering, and switch if they’re no longer making progress.

This suggests that educators should:

Give learners the choice of what to study next (rather than deciding this for them);
Encourage learners to focus on making progress, and switch if they are not;
Provide alternative support for the most challenging tasks (e.g., study sessions with tutors or peers).

To solve a problem like Maria’s, the best approach would be to move (sooner) to somewhat easier work once she perceives that she’s not learning. As Kornell and Metcalfe (2006, p. 610) put it, “Prioritizing moderately difficult items is the most effective strategy”.

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